1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document service integrated system, and more particularly to a system that allows diverse business documents managed by plural databases to be used among plural clients according to business processes.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A series of activities, for example, in the manufacturing and sales of products has plural processes. For example, the series of activities has proposal and planning, design, approval, production, distribution, sales, support, and other processes. Generally, there are many cases where each process is committed to a different section and a different system is installed for each section. For example, in a design section, a system to treat design drawings is installed, and in a sales section, a system to manage operation information including sales information and other information is installed.
Although, recently, with the widespread use of an Intranet, systems within a company are being physically integrated, there is not yet provided a system that integrates diverse systems on a series of business processes and can comprehensively support all business processes.
By the way, as a method of managing business processes, a so-called workflow system is known. This method successively transfers given documents (nucleus business documents) between processes, thereby managing the progress of activities. For example, for a design change activity, a predetermined request sheet is first created as a document, and by circulating it, design, approval, and other processes precede in a step-by-step manner. Although such a document is usually circulated as paper among persons in charge, recently, the approach of circulating it in the format of electronic document by using electronic mail is also adopted. In either case, the nucleus of activity progress is the document and the location or status of the document reflects the progress of the activity.
The above-described business documents is often provided with various data such as related documents, statistical information, and drawings. However, as described above, conventionally, since a series of business processes has been built on plural services, more specifically, on applications (application programs) or databases (database systems), it has been difficult to share and exchange information between individual systems. Accordingly, actually, it has been a common practice to print information related to an activity concerned as required and attach it.
Of course, if software for connecting the systems is created among them, connections among the individual systems could be established. However, such customization would require much cost and cause difficulties in flexible accommodation to specification change of the individual systems.
A workflow management system is disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 10-326314. In the system, a document to be processed is electronically circulated among persons in charge according to flow control information including processing contents, procedure, persons in charge, process definitions describing the rules for deciding them, document circulation status, and processing status. The process definitions are referred to when shifting the status of the document.
Also, there is disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 9-282250 that a document circulation route is described in an electronic document. Systems supporting a workflow are disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application Nos. Hei 8-320901 and No. Hei 10-111888.
Furthermore, hierarchical creation of a workflow is disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 10-105623, and in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 8-161393, items for relating not specific persons directly to but abstract roles to activities are disclosed.
However, none of the above-described literatures describes centralized management of various documents with business processes in mind and flexible data exchange between applications or clients using them and databases.
The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances and provides a document service integrated system that integrates diverse document services (systems) concerned in business processes, supports the business processes, and implements rational document processing.
The present invention also provides a document service integrated system that integrally manages a variety of existing applications and databases by mutually connecting them, thereby achieving promotion of document use and centralized management of documents.
(1) The present invention is a system provided between at least one client to use documents and at least one database to manage the documents. The system includes a management part having a control part that integrally manages various documents managed by the database according to business processes and a processing part that processes document operation requests from the clients, a first interface part that establishes an interface between the clients and the management part, and a second interface part that establishes an interface between the databases and the management part.
According to the above-described configuration, a document service integrated system is provided between at least one client and at least one database (database system), and by the integrated system, services (that is, various applications (application programs) and various databases used on the clients) are integrated on a network. Plural documents managed by the database are integrally managed according to business processes.
An interface between the management part and clients (applications used in the client in basic mode) is established by the first interface part, and this means enables any number of various clients (or applications) to be connected so long as an interface complying with the first interface part is available. An interface between the management part and databases is established by the second interface part, and this means enables any number of various databases to be connected so long as an interface complying with the second interface part is available. Here, for each of the databases to be connected, it is desirable that a facility handler to individually establish an interface between the database and the management part can be plugged in. In this configuration, the second interface part is configured with as many facility handlers as the number of databases to be integrated in the system or the number of types of the databases.
According to the above-described configuration, plural systems can be linked with each other to create a new business system. Moreover, a variety of documents managed by different types of plural databases can be integrally managed based on business processes. That is, plural distributed documents are managed in centralized manner so that they can be used by many clients. Therefore, since various documents on the system appear to the clients as if they were managed by a single database, a standardized access means can be provided to individual clients. Particularly, the above-described configuration allows existing systems (services) to be used without modifications, bringing about a cost advantage and providing excellent flexibility and expandability for the system. For example, the sharing of information within a company is further promoted.
The concept of documents contains various electronic multimedia data (particularly text data, drawing data, image data, and other data used in business). Various applications can be constituted as part of a document service integrated system or resources managed by it. In this case, the applications can be shared among plural clients. In this case, documents are manipulated by the applications on the document service integrated system and the execution results can be provided to the clients, or functions of all or part of applications on the document service integrated system may be transferred to the clients to process the documents by processing functions on the clients. Alternatively, from the beginning, applications necessary to individual clients may be installed to pass documents to the applications for processing. In short, system configurations may be changed as required according to various conditions.
(2) Preferably, in the configuration described in (1), the control part has a first table in which definitions to associate plural documents are stored for each business process, and the processing part processes the document operation requests according to the association definitions.
With the above-described configuration, for each business process, plural documents (e.g., proposals, initial design drawings, changed design drawings, manuals, directions, management information, etc.) relating to the business process are mutually associated. That is, a document set for each business process is created.
(3) Preferably, in the configuration described in (2), the processing part has the function of searching documents according to the association definitions. With the configuration, according to the association definitions, from a particular document, documents related to it can be searched for, or all documents used in a particular business process can be searched for. Of course, in such searches, the clients need not consider the actual locations and registration attributes of the documents.
(4) Preferably, in the configuration described in (2), the processing part has the function of collectively printing plural documents mutually associated, according to the association definitions. The configuration enables all or part of plural documents relating to a particular business process to be collectively printed, heavily reducing loads on the users.
(5) Preferably, in the configuration described in (1), the control part has a second table in which status transition definitions in business processes are stored, and the processing part processes the document operation requests according to the status transition definitions. With this configuration, the statuses of business processes can be managed based on documents in place of a conventional approach based on humans (persons in charge).
(6) Preferably, in the configuration described in (5), the control part has a third table in which correspondences between role names and user names are defined, the status transition definitions can contain the role names, and the processing part processes the document operation requests according to the status transition definitions and the correspondences. The configuration enables status transition conditions to be described by abstract role names. Accordingly, even if a person in charge is changed, only the contents of the third table need to be modified. The role name here refers to an abstract name such as a creator, an approver, a manager, a person in charge of input-output operations, and a user. The user name refers to, e.g., a concrete person name (or its ID) or the name of a group including them as members.
(7) Preferably, in the configuration described in (1), the control part has a fourth table in which definitions of data format conversion among plural applications are stored, and the processing part, according to the definitions of data format conversion, converts a document of a first data format created by a first application to a document of a second format and passes the document of the second data format to a second application. The configuration enables each application to always receive documents of a data format it can process. The results can be used in the clients.
(8) Preferably, in the configuration described in (1), the control part has a fifth table in which publicity range definitions for each document are stored, and the processing part limits access to documents according to the publicity range definitions. The configuration enables a publicity range to be freely set according to the contents of business processes and the nature of documents, providing security for the documents.
(9) Preferably, in the configuration described in (1), the management part has a log recording part that records logs on a series of document operations in business processes. According to the configuration, since logs on each operation are recorded, the business processes can be improved by analyzing the logs.
(10) The present invention also provides a system that can connect documents to plural clients using them on various applications, and to plural databases managing the documents. The system includes a management part having a control part that integrally manages various documents managed by the databases according to business processes and a processing part that processes document operation requests from the clients, a first interface part that establishes an interface between the applications and the management part, and a second interface part that establishes an interface between the databases and the management part.
According to the above-described configuration, a desired number of applications and a desired number of databases can be connected, and by integrating their services, various documents existing in the plural databases can be managed in centralized manner.
(11) Preferably, with the configuration of (10), the first interface part has the function of interpreting instructions following predetermined application interface rules.
(12) Preferably, in the configuration described in (10), the second interface part is constituted of plural facility handlers provided corresponding to individual databases.
(13) Preferably, the above-described management part is constituted by software as middleware. The first interface part and the second interface part are also constituted by software. The software is stored in a storage device on a computer system and executed by the CPU. The software may be installed in the storage device by portable media and communications.